The pace of Bay Area home sales reversed its July uptick and dropped again in August, marking a return to the long-running waiting game that many potential buyers and sellers have been playing for more than a year.

Parts of the East Bay and Solano County, are bucking the trend with active bottom-feeding in foreclosure-stressed neighborhoods, according to real estate information service DataQuick.

A total of 7,232 new and resale houses and condos were sold in the nine-county Bay Area in August. That was down 4.7 percent from 7,586 in July, and down 0.9 percent from 7,299 in August 2007, according to DataQuick.

Last month”s sales total was the second-lowest for an August, behind 6,688 sales in August 1992, in MDA DataQuick”s statistics, which go back to 1988. An “average” August had 10,031 sales, while the peak August in 2004 had 13,940.

“Mortgage money for homes above the half-million-dollar mark is hard to come by right now, even for well-qualified buyers. Because homes are more expensive in the Bay Area than elsewhere, this issue will have a bigger impact on home sales there. Mortgage availability will eventually loosen up, we just don”t know when, especially after the past few days,” said John Walsh, DataQuick president.

The use of so-called jumbo mortgages, until recently defined as more than $417,000, has plummeted since the credit crunch hit in August 2007, making jumbo loans more expensive and harder to obtain. Last month mortgages of more than $417,000 made up 32.3 percent of all home purchase loans, down from 58.6 percent in August 2007.

August home sales jumped in Solano and Contra Costa counties as bargain hunters scooped up distressed properties at prices not seen in more than five years. Across the Bay Area, foreclosure resales made up 36.1 percent of all resales last month, up from 33.3 percent in July and 4.4 percent a year ago. The figure represents the percentage of homes resold in August that had been foreclosed on at some point in the prior 12 months.

At the county level, foreclosure resales ranged from 8.6 percent of resales in San Francisco to 61.3 percent in Solano County.

The median price paid for all new and resale houses and condos sold in the Bay Area last month was $447,000, down 4.9 percent from $470,000 in July and down a record 31.8 percent from $655,000 in August 2007, according to DataQuick.

Last month”s median stood at the lowest point since January 2004, when it was $440,000. The median peaked at $665,000 in June, July and August of 2007.

The typical monthly mortgage payment that Bay Area buyers committed themselves to paying was $2,121 last month, down from $2,218 the previous month, and down from $3,171 a year ago. Adjusted for inflation, current payments are 18.5 percent below typical payments in the spring of 1989, the peak of the prior real estate cycle. They are 38.7 percent below the current cycle”s peak in June 2006.